This application is concerned with organising and storing documents for subsequent retrieval.
According to the present invention there is provided a data handling device for organising and storing documents for subsequent retrieval, the documents having associated metadata terms, the device comprising:    means providing access to a store of existing metadata;    means operable to analyse the existing metadata to generate statistical data as to the co-occurrence of pairs of terms in the metadata of one and the same document;    means for analysing a fresh document to assign to it a set of terms and determine for each a measure of their strength of association with the document;    means operable to determine for each term of the set a score that is a monotonically increasing function of (a) the strength of association with the document and of (b) the relative frequency of co-occurrence, in the existing metadata, of that term and another term that occurs in the set;    means operable to select, as metadata for the fresh document, a subset of the terms in the set having the highest scores.
Other aspects of the invention are defined in the claims.